Amazing performance with RAMdisk. [en]

RAMdisk

A small program that turns your available ram memory into a extreme performance disk drive. Turns out this is a developer must have!

Why RAMdisk.

RAMdisk is a tool with which you can use RAM as disk drive, De read and write speed of RAM memory is many times faster than even the fastest. Development of files and databases require fast file acces and rapid read and write speeds, These are things an conventional hard drive just can’t deliver. In this example Hdtune and a community deployment of magento will be used for testing. The program hd tune which is freeware can be downloaded from HERE.

Hardware specifitions

Conventional harddrive

77 Mb/s read
16 Ms access time

Ramdisk

3080 Mb/s read
0.011 Ms access time

Read speed

Access time

The results don’t lie performance gain is incredible for read speed aswell as acces time. The Average read speed for the RAMdisk is 40 times as fast that’s 4000% faster incredible! I also wanted to check my write speeds but wasn’wasn’t able unformat my hard drive at the time.

Magento 1.8 performance conventional harddrive

Magento frontend

Magento backend

Magento 1.8 performance ramdisk

Magento frontend

Magento backend

Performance results in seconds:
This means that RAMdisk made the response of Magento 14 times as fast that’s 1400%! Finally I want to point out that this is the Community edition of magento 1.8 and that both the files and the database were placed on RAMdisk.
Services where:

USBwebserver

Apache 2.4.6

PHP 5.4.17

Mysql server 5.6

How to install and configure RAMdisk

RAMdisk is available for download HERE And is free for personal use with a capacity of up to 4 gigabytes.
After downloading and installing you’ll be presented this window:You can see if already setup the RAMdisk, you can set the size at the left top and choose whether to format the drive or leave it unformated. Then you press start RAMdisk and you’ll be asked to install the driver. The driver install is one time only.
If you have checked the unformatted partition its probably a good idea to format the drive. To do this press windows+r and type diskmgmt.msc then press enter.
At this point you will see one Disk that is reported unallocated. In this image mine is already formated as NTFS disk. By right clicking on the unallocated disk space an menu with the option: New Simple volume will appear. Pressing this will start the making of your new RAMdisk. Select a drive letter and a file system like NTFS/Fat16 and Fat32 and you will be ready to go.
With additional RAMdisk settings you can make RAMdisk start at windows startup copy files to a “real” disk on shutdown and make it backup the RAMdisk automatically every X minutes. It should be noted that automatic backups are a pro feature though.
A fair warning: If your system crashes all files on the RAMdisk are lost! RAM memory requires power to store its data. If power is lost all data is lost.
I hope you get to great results with your RAMdisk, mine has made me more then happy thats for sure!